Erie Arts & Culture welcomes KCJ Szwedzinski as our next visiting artist in residence. KCJ arrived in Erie on February 1 from Seattle, Washington and her residency will conclude on March 1.
In early 2020, Erie Arts & Culture launched a visiting artist residency program in collaboration with Long Road Projects. Through this program, Erie Arts & Culture and Long Road Projects provide contemporary artists with dedicated time and space to reflect, research, and create new bodies of work – outside of their usual environments. This program also creates opportunities for new perspectives and creative processes to be shared, which in turn positively impacts the cultural and creative landscape in Northwestern Pennsylvania.
This visiting artist residency program is made possible through the generous support of a privately funded grant from The Erie Community Foundation.
KCJ's residency is entitled “The Deep Structure of Matter," and will explore the descriptions of matter as they exist within the world of physics. Her work created while in residence will also linguistic concepts proposed by Noam Chomsky, in which sentences have a surface and deep structure.
"The deep structure is the abstract structure that allows the native speaker of a language to know what the sentence means," KCJ explained. "It may then be said that the deep structure expresses the semantic contents of a sentence, whereas the surface structure of a sentence determines its phonetic form. This feels relevant to me because the work I intend to explore has themes of anxiety, uncertainty, the duality between the internal and the external, and a dogged and persistent reminder of the mark. The mark we make on the world, and that of the world marking us right back. The idea of layers, both in the physical structure of the world as well as the intangible world of language feels like an apt metaphor for my exploration.
While in Erie, KCJ will build upon her body of large-scale performative drawings. She aims to create a sound installation using paper and speech bots. It's possible that this work will be informed by the 7[day average of COVID infections from the past year.
In addition to her performative drawing, KCJ will publish an edition using a printmaking process called drypoint etching.
About the Artist:
KCJ Szwedzinski was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in New England and South Florida before moving to Jacksonville, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Printmaking and Art History at the University of North Florida. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Louisville in Kentucky with a concentration in sculpture and glass. Her recent work investigates the intersection of Jewish legacy and lived experience - asking questions about what we choose to embody, embrace, or deny from our inherited legacies. She was recently the 2018 recipient of the Mary Alice Hadley Prize for Visual Art and spent part of the year traveling to do research at the Holocaust Center and The Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. She exhibits her work regularly across the country and recently received merit and juror awards for the 10 x 10 x 10 show in Tieton, Washington and The Blue Grass Biennial in Morehead, Kentucky. Recent exhibitions include In the Hot Seat at KMAC Museum in Louisville, KY and the Glass Art Society + Refract NW Member Showcase at Gallery Mack in Seattle. She has studied and assisted at Penland School of Craft and Pilchuck Glass School and has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Upcoming, she will be an artist in residence at the Chulitna Research Institute in Alaska. KCJ currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Are you interested in meeting KCJ or conducting a studio visit?
